Free The Cage Keeper by André Dubus III

against the white material of her shirt. When Freeze pulls back onto San Pablo Barry takes another sip from his bottle of Mateus.
    Freeze drives fast through El Cerrito into Richmond and all the windows are down but the inside of the car is so hot Lorilee smells the old vinyl of the seats, the rust of the ceiling under its tattered covering, a hanging flap of it rippling back against itself. They pass the small shops and pool halls along San Pablo, some with windows held together with dusty gray plumber’s tape, this one-story row of wood and cinder-block buildings looking as settled in their shabbiness as the old men who sit in the shadows of the stoops.
    “We’re going up to the quarry,” Barry says to Lorilee. “The beach is too friggin’ hot and crowded.” He takes the bottle from her and wipes it before drinking. When he hands it over to Freeze his arm pushes against Lorilee’s breasts. Her cheeks flush, and when they do, pain breathes heavy under her eye. She reaches up to tilt the mirror down but then Freeze’s hand slaps hers away.
    “Do you guys have any aspirin I could take?”
    Barry is tapping his fingers hard on the dashboard in time to the Tom Petty tape Freeze has been playing all morning. He looks at Lorilee looking back at him then shakes his head in time to the beat, looks straight ahead again.
    “Here.” Freeze takes another sip then wedges the bottle down between Lorilee’s closed legs. It feels cool and damp there and Lorilee waits a second or two before picking it up. Freeze pulls the car up over the gravel and parks it under the jackknife-scarred branches of the old tree. They overlook the pit of the quarry.
    “All right. Nobody’s here,” Barry says as they get out of the car. Freeze keeps the music going and walks around to the front, sits on the hood in the shade. He looks out over the muddy water that is almost green in the midday sun, and lights a cigarette. “How’s Glenn?”
    “What?” Lorilee turns away from Barry, stripped to his skivvies, toe-stepping over the gravel down the slope to the water. She sits on the hood beside Freeze.
    “What did you say?”
    “How’s your brother Glennie doing?”
    Lorilee shrugs her shoulders. “Who knows? Do you have an extra cigarette, Freeze?”
    He offers her his pack, watches her take one then put it to her lips. He hands her his cigarette and she lights hers with it. They both hear Barry’s flabby body make a big splash.
    “I think he’s on a ship. He sent a postcard with a picture of a big ship on it.”
    Lorilee takes a deep drag off her cigarette, remembers the slow sway of her brother’s chain bracelet over the green felt, the crack of the break, the balls rolling out in every direction on the table, then the thunk of one falling into a corner pocket. He had looked up at her with his fist-swollen lips.
“The marines, man. Fuck him.
I don’t have to eat his shit anymore.”
    Freeze looks at Lorilee’s face. “Get the bottle out of the car, will ya?”
    “Okay.”
    Freeze sees Barry’s whiteness splashing in the water below.
    “Come on in, man. Nothin’ like it.”
    “Later.”
    Lorilee leans into the music to pick the bottle up off the front seat and when she straightens brown fills her eyes; she half sits, half drops to the seat, breathes deeply through her nose, and looks straight ahead at the gravel, at bits of broken glass that glitter there in the sun.
    “Where’s the wine?”
    Lorilee stands back up and walks around the open door to the front of the car and Freeze. She hands him the bottle, picks her burning cigarette up off the hood, and leans against the grille. It hurts the most when she sits, a pain she has only known once before when her bowels were heavy but she had to wait for her father to come out of the bathroom first, when it seemed that hours passed before she heard the toilet flush and saw the door open. It had felt like a steel chain being pulled from her insides and there was blood and she had